


No One Knows But You

by stjarna



Series: The ghosts no one knew [1]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Maveth story, Angst, Episode: s03e02 Purpose in the Machine, Episode: s03e05 4722 Hours, Episode: s03e07 Chaos Theory, F/M, Fitzsimmons Appreciation Week, Hope, Isolation, Lots of Angst, Please stick with it 'til the end despite the dark and angsty undertones, References to and quotes from "Purpose in the Machine" "4722 hours" and "Chaos Theory", Song Lyrics, Tumblr: thefitzsimmonsnetwork
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-18
Updated: 2016-09-18
Packaged: 2018-08-15 17:34:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8066443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stjarna/pseuds/stjarna
Summary: How does Jemma cope with being all alone on an alien planet. An(other) alternate Maveth story (with some parallels to and quotes from “Purpose in the Machine,” “4,722 hours,” and “Chaos Theory”, but multiple divergences, especially later on in the story).[Originally posted in the Fitzsimmons Appreciation Week series, but moved to a new series, since I wrote a sequel.]





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Day 7 (Free day || Bonus prompt: What are you looking forward to for Fitz and Simmons?) of Fitzsimmons Appreciation Week Sept. 12-18, 2016 (organized by The Fitzsimmons Network)
> 
> The title is a reference to the song “No One Knows But You” by Beth Nielsen Chapman. It is a song so sad and hopeful and beautiful that it brings me close to tears every time I hear it. The lyrics are scattered through the fanfic, but I recommend listening to the song before you read (e.g. https://youtu.be/Z97bwy4aT5c), but that’s obviously voluntary

She scrambles to reach for the portal that is closing in front of her eyes. But her hands grab nothing but sand. It has disappeared. Gone.

“Fitz?” she mumbles in shock, staring at the grains in her hand, slowly seeping through the spaces between her fingers and back onto the ground.

She looks around.

All she sees is sand and rocks, engulfed in darkness. She looks up to the sky. Millions of stars sparkle in the dark next to two moons, and she realizes that the portal didn’t just take her away from the base, it had taken her further than she ever thought possible. Fear creeps up her spine, fills her heart, her mind.

It is quiet. Deafening.

She sits down in the sand and tries to calm down. She decides to follow protocol. _Stay where you are. Don’t move. Wait for extraction_. But the portal doesn’t re-open. No one comes. She is alone.

She waits. Starts a timer on her phone, watches the seconds tick by. Begins recording a log. _Follow protocol. Keep a record_. Eight hours pass.

Nothing.

All alone.

She feels a cool breeze that makes her shiver. The vastness of the desert, the silence, the darkness frighten her. Even the stars and moons—which look magnificent in the night sky—heighten her anxiety.

She grabs her phone again and goes to her photo gallery. He hates having his picture taken, but she had caught him at the right moment, a shy smile on his face, looking directly at her. Her fingers gently move across his face. She watches the birthday video he had sent her while she was visiting her parents. Seeing him, hearing his voice, his joyful laughter, gives her comfort. She closes her eyes and thinks she can feel his presence, and when she opens her eyes, the unfamiliar surroundings don’t seem quite as frightening anymore. _They will find me, **he** will find me. After all, we're going for dinner._ All she has to do is stay strong until then. She is strong. She knows she is.

* * *

_I can almost feel you smiling_  
_From beyond those silver skies_  
_As you watch me finding my way  
_ _Here without you in my life_

* * *

“What is it you always say?” she says, looking at his smiling face on her screen, “If you can't solve a problem, sleep on it.”

She falls asleep. A restless sleep full of dark and scary visions, being pulled away by an invisible force, away from him, unable to grab his hand that is reaching for her. Her heart is pounding when she finally wakes up only to realize that she has gone from one nightmare to another; except this one isn’t a dream, it is real. The landscape is still bathed in a cold, dark blue. The wind whispers ghostly sounds.

She scrambles to get up and looks around. Panic-stricken. She screams into the vast emptiness, “Where is the sun?! What did you do to it?! I want the sun! I want it! I want to go home.”

No sound returns. Not even her own echo.

She sits back down and for the first time since her arrival allows herself to cry.

She doesn’t move for hours. Feels numb. Stares at a single spot right in front of her.

Then she awakens from her daze. She looks up, into the distance. She can’t give up. They will come. He won’t give up on her. But she had to accept that it might take them awhile. The average person can survive up to three weeks without food, but only 100 hours without water. Her body needed water. She had to break protocol. Had to leave the area. She builds an arrow pointing in the direction she intends to head in.

“I'm sorry, Fitz,” she says quietly as she places her grandmother’s necklace on one of the stones of the arrow, “I can't wait here any longer. But if you do show up while I'm away, you'll know where to find me.”

Twenty-three hours have passed. She starts walking. Straight ahead. Stops only once to allow herself to rest. She keeps walking. Seventy-one hours. Her body grows weaker, her mind grows heavy. She loses her sense of direction. Can’t tell anymore if she is walking straight or in circles. She loses the way to the entry spot. But she keeps going. She has to keep going. She needs water.

Ninety-three hours. When her eyes catch a glimpse of the dark, small pool of liquid, she first thinks she is hallucinating. She stumbles down the sand dune, towards the surface that shimmers dark in the never-ending night. She falls to her knees and wants to cry when her hands touch the surface and her fingers dip into the cold water, but her body is so depleted that it can’t form any tears. She drinks eagerly, ignores the strange taste, ignores the little voice in the back of her mind warning her that the liquid could be poisonous, could be harmful. Her body is thirsty, her cells, her brain, her mind need this water. So she drinks. Then she lies down in the sand, relieved, feeling safer, feeling hope once again. She leaves one of her hands in the water, reassuring her that she has really found it, that it is truly there.

She stays right there. By the water. Even after she is attacked by the strange white tentacles that live in the pond. She can’t leave. She needs the water.

Five hundred and four hours have passed. Twenty-one Earth days. Three weeks.

She knows she has to eat. She talks to Fitz. Not too often, as not to drain her battery too quickly. But recording messages for him feels like holding a conversation with him. And she knows what he would tell her, she knows he would encourage her, and it gives her strength. Strength to build a fire, to build a weapon, to dive into the pond, play bait, and overpower the beast. Food. She finally had food, hunted it herself. It makes her feel stronger, more powerful, more determined.

“You'd be so proud of me, Fitz,” she records into her phone, “I killed the monster plant, then I made a fire, cooked him, and ate him.” She laughs, “And then I burped really loud.”

She grows thoughtful, serious.

“Everyone always said we could read each other's minds, Fitz. So I really need you to read mine right now,” she pauses, “I'm alive. But I'm terribly alone and afraid. So I really need you to come and get me, okay? I know you won't give up, so I won't, either.”

* * *

_No one knows but you_  
_How I feel inside_  
_No one knows  
_ _No one knows but you_

* * *

1,344 hours. It has been two months. Two months of staring at sand, rocks, her little pond, the moons, the stars. Ever-lasting darkness.

“Fitz, it's possible I'm on one of the poles,” she records, “but it's strange. The stars and the two moons, they keep disappearing and reappearing. But there's no sun. There's never a sun.”

She succumbs to the idea that she will never see the sun again, not here anyways. That this was the planet of night, of darkness.

Two months of silence. No voice but her own, when she quietly talks to herself, or to Fitz, who only answers in her mind.

“I imagine our dinner sometimes,” she says to the camera, “where we'd go, what we'd eat. I wonder about us a lot, actually. … There's this small cottage, in Perthshire we drove by once when I was a girl, some… some family holiday, and I don't know why, but I… I found it so lovely. I still think about it… A place where you and I could have…” she can’t finish the sentence. It was so hard sometimes to hold on to hope, but she had promised him, she had promised him not to give up.

The only other sounds she hears sometimes are the wind’s ghostly whispers. They haunt her, and what petrifies her most is not knowing if there was an actual danger surrounding her, a strange, real power, or if it was all in her mind, if the only thing haunting her was herself. The wind frightens her when it whispers. Except for those times, when it picks up while she is sleeping, when it is soft and gentle, and it brushes against her and she wakes up thinking that it is Fitz, gently grabbing her shoulder, gently brushing the hair out of her face. Then the wind gives her hope, makes her believe he is there, reminds her of her promise.

* * *

_I've come so close to believing_  
_All the echoes of the wind_  
_Brushing my hair off my shoulders  
_ _I feel you there once again_

_No one knows but you_  
_How I feel inside_  
_No one knows  
_ _No one knows but you_

* * *

More time passes. She rarely checks her phone anymore to see how long it has been exactly. It doesn’t matter.

“I'm not sure how long this battery will last,” she records one day, “I should save it, just in case… for more important things. But I'll still talk to you on my own, if that's all right. I'll always be with you, Fitz.”

She doesn’t know if it is boredom or fear, but at some point she decides that she needs to explore her surroundings better, needs to see if she can find the spot where she arrived, or at least to see if she can find better shelter.

She leaves a clear trail behind to guide her back to her pond, back to water. Little cairns of stones at equal intervals.

She walks through the desert for hours. Climbs dune after dune. And then she sees them in one of the valleys: simple wooden crosses, two standing up, two on the ground, blown over by the wind, adorned with something white and spherical. Slowly, she climbs down the other side of the dune and walks towards the crosses. Her heart is pounding; anxious and excited at the same time at the first sight of civilization. She picks up one of the white round objects and looks at it: an astronaut’s helmet. She looks over at the crosses and realizes what she has found. She walks from one grave to the next, slowly, as to pay her respect for strangers she never met and who yet seemed to have shared a similar fate. She stops when she reaches the fourth and final grave. A skeleton lies in front of it, the remains of a NASA uniform barely holding on to the sanded bones. She kneels down next to it. Her eyes immediately catch sight of the gunshot wound; a single hole in the temple of the skull. She looks around and finds a gun, buried by sand. Its magazine is empty. It wasn’t hard to imagine what had happened to this person; the last survivor; alone. For hours? For days? For months? For years? How long had it been? How long before he used a single bullet as a ticket out of this living hell? She shudders at the thought. Her heart starts pounding. Fear creeps up from the darkest parts of her mind. How long could she endure it? How long before the isolation and loneliness would get the better of her? How long before she couldn’t take it anymore?

She pulls out her phone and turns it on. She glances at the timer: 2,016 hours. Three months. She wants to preserve power, but she has to see his face, has to hear his voice. Hope. He was her hope.

She starts crying when his smile appears on the screen; presses the phone against her pounding chest. Slowly, she calms down. Slowly, her mind grows stronger again, absorbs his smile, his eyes, his faith in her.

She looks around and discovers the hatch.

Carefully, she climbs down the ladder and into the cave. A single cot set up in one corner, a few more leaning against the wall, a table, chairs, scratched up metal plates and cutlery, a few crates. In a side-cave she finds technical equipment, computers, scanners, and solar panels, presumably intended to power everything. Not very useful on a planet where the sun never shone. The equipment looks ancient. Well, in recent scientific progress terms speaking.

She goes back into the main cave and opens one of the crates. Hand-drawn maps lie on top. She picks them up, studies the stylized landscape, mountains, a canyon; she even finds her pond. She puts the maps aside and looks back into the crate. It is filled with thick notebooks, meticulously arranged, numbered. She grabs Nr. 1 and opens it to the first page. 

> _September 20, 2001 - Initial Mission Report_  
>  _Arrival: 0800._  
>  _Team: Cmdr. Frank Taylor (astrophysicist), Lt. Cmdr. Geoffrey Brubaker (botanist), Lt. Brian Austin (geologist), Lt. William Daniels (technician)  
>  _ _Initial Assessment: The planet has a breathable, oxygenated atmosphere. Gravity appears slightly stronger compared to Earth. The terrain is barren, desert-like. Although conditions seem favorable for terrestrial organisms, there's no immediate sign of life nor any noticeable vegetation or water.  
>  _ _Task assignment: Set-up preliminary camp. Explore area once sun rises to find water and more suitable base camp location._

She pages through the mission logs. Reads entry after entry.

> _October 15, 2001_  
>  _Time: 1300_  
>  _Team: Taylor, Brubaker, Austin, Daniels  
>  _ _Mission report: Daniels found a cave large enough to house all of us, our equipment, and belongings. It should provide us with sufficient protection from the sandstorms._
> 
> _October 17, 2001_  
>  _Time: 1800  
>  _ _Team: Taylor, Brubaker, Austin, Daniels  
>  _ _Mission report: Austin has determined that the luminescent substrata below the ground, which is particularly noticeable in our cave, is a natural source of heat. Keeps the planet warm without sunlight._

She reads book after book. Develops a routine: She leaves the cave to get water, to find food, and returns to keep reading. Eat. Sleep. Read. Repeat. Hour after hour.

> _September 20, 2002 – Annual report_  
>  _Time: 0800  
>  _ _Team: Taylor, Brubaker, Austin, Daniels  
>  _ _Mission report: It has been one year. So far no extraction team. We always knew this could be a one-way mission. Will continue our routine. Gather data to the best of our abilities. Who knows, maybe soon._

At some point, the entries stop having dates. She assumes that whatever equipment they had to tell time had broken. She thinks of her phone, its slowly draining battery.

She keeps reading. She notices the change in tone over time. They stop being mission logs and become diaries. Initially, the entries still sound hopeful, but soon they become filled with fear, anger, desperation, and grief.

> _Austin threw himself off a cliff. Held a memorial for him. May his soul find peace._

She grabs for her cheek, surprised to find tears streaming down her face. She was reading about the death of a man she had never met, and yet he had become so strangely familiar.

> _Brubaker set himself on fire. Daniels insisted on a memorial. Even set up a cross. Idiot._

Taylor’s tone becomes bitter. Harsh. She turns the page. The handwriting looks different. Jemma swallows, sensing what it meant. Her heart starts to race as she reads the final entry: 

> _I buried Taylor today. He took an axe to the gear and then he came after me. I had one job. Keep them alive. They were my team. I have failed. I have failed them all._

Her head starts spinning and tears stream down her face, as she finally realizes something about the graveyard at her front door. Four crosses. There were four crosses. For four team members. Daniels had built his own grave, his own memorial; laid himself to rest next to them, the ones he had tried to protect.

She scrambles to get up, climbs up the ladder, and runs to the far end of the camp. She drops to her knees and throws up. Then she sits up. Hyperventilating. Visions flashing before her eyes of men she had never met. She has no idea what they looked like, and yet they all have faces, distorted, distraught faces. She sees them losing hope, sees them going mad, sees them choosing death over life.

Anger fills her. Anger at them. Anger at the planet. Anger at the monolith. Anger at her fear.

She stands up and turns around. Determined she walks to the four graves. She picks up Daniels’ gun and looks at it. Breathing heavily. Raging inside. She pulls her arm back and flings the gun in the air, away from the graves, away from the camp, away from what she is forced to call her home. She screams as the gun sails through the air and lands in one of the dunes.

“ ** _NO!_** ” she yells into the empty desert, “ ** _NOOOOO!_** ” She turns to the graves, addresses the ghosts of the men she had read about, “ ** _Do you hear me?_** ” she screams at the wooden crosses, “ ** _I won’t give up! I won’t!_** If there's a way in, there has to be a way out! I’ll find it! **_Do you hear me?_** I’ll find it. Just because **_you_** didn’t find it, doesn’t mean I won’t! Just because **_you_** gave up, doesn’t mean I will! **_You won’t stop me!_** You won’t!”

Then she drops to her knees and cries, but it isn’t sadness, it is strength that makes her cry.

The next day, she begins exploring the area. She packs food and water, and starts walking. She uses the hand-drawn maps. She is starting to get tired when she reaches the canyon. It is deep and wide. Steep cliffs bathed in the dark blue that engulfs the entire planet. The two moons shine on the other side, so large that it almost feels as if she could touch them. Millions of stars glimmer on the horizon. And for the first time in a long time, Jemma looks at the landscape and feels serenity.

She sleeps under the stars, by the canyon, then hikes back to her cave.

Soon, she decides to return to the canyon, the moons shining above it. She seems to be drawn to it. Returns regularly. And every time she comes back to it, her feet seem to be inching closer to the edge of the cliff. Until it reaches a point where it would only take one more step. One more step to end it all. She shudders when she notices it. Quickly she takes a few steps back and exhales sharply. She hikes back to the cave, determined not to go back to the canyon. Instead, she turns on her phone and looks at Fitz’s smile, and it makes her heartbeat slow down, it clears her mind.

It has been 4,080 hours, 170 days, about 5.5 months.

Every time she feels the canyon calling for her, she turns on her phone.

The battery dies after 4,713 hours, and whatever bit of hope she has left dies with it.

She stares at the black screen. Doesn’t cry. Just sits on a chair in front of an empty table holding her phone. When she looks up and around the cave, it feels like its walls are closing in on her. Panic strikes her. She climbs up the ladder, opens the hatch, and takes a deep breath. It is dark. The same darkness she has experienced for almost six months. And yet it feels even darker. She looks around the camp. Sees the crosses, the helmets, Daniels’ deteriorating uniform. The wind picks up and she can hear the whispers, whispers she hadn’t heard for months. The ghosts have returned, except they aren’t the ghosts of others, they are her own demons.

She starts running until she is out of breath. She stumbles to the ground, her hands digging into the sand. She pulls them up and sees the sand seep through the space between her fingers, like grains in an hourglass. She looks into the distance. It is there. Somewhere. The canyon. Serenity. She pulls herself up and starts walking. Walks until she reaches it.

She inches closer to the cliff. Like she had done before. Only one more step. She is waiting for the fear to creep up again; the fear of herself, of her thoughts. But it doesn’t. She stands by the edge.

“I’m sorry, Fitz,” she whispers, and feels tears streaming down her face, “I tried.”

She closes her eyes and takes one final breath.

The wind brushes her shoulders, and one last time she feels a gentle warm touch, as if his hand was reaching out for her, as if a cloak made of light engulfed her. She feels serenity. Feels ready. She opens her eyes and gasps.

The canyon is bathed in sunlight. Slowly, she turns around to find the source of the light and is almost blinded. Yet she can’t help but stare at it. She walks towards it. The sun wraps the entire planet in a ray of gold and warmth and hope, and she absorbs it all: the heat, the light, the hope.

And then her eyes catch a glimpse of something else. For a moment she doesn’t trust her eyes. Her heart starts pounding. Then she starts running. Running towards the portal. She jumps, not wanting to take the risk of slowing down, afraid that it could close as quickly as it appeared. Her mind doesn’t care that she has no idea where it will take her. All she wants is to hold on to the thought that it will take her back home, back to him.

* * *

_And if there is some magic_  
_Some way around these stars_  
_Some road that I can travel_  
_To get to where you are_  
_I'll cry this empty canyon  
_ _An ocean full of tears_

_And I won't stop believing  
_ _That your love is always near_

* * *

Her body smashes against the bulletproof glass of the crate and forces the half-closed door to swing open. She falls to the concrete floor. Her head is spinning, her body is aching, the air feels heavy, gravity lighter. A shotgun is lying next to her on the floor. She tries to sit up and stares at the monolith inside its crate. She scrambles up and runs towards it. She slams the door shut, frantically tries to close the locks until she notices that they’ve been shot to pieces. She leans forward against the glass, breathing heavily, while tears start streaming down her face.

“Jemma!”

She turns around. Her mind still unsure whether she can trust what she sees. Maybe she was dead. Maybe she had taken that final step into the beautiful serene abyss of her canyon, and everything else was just a vision. Or worse, maybe she was dreaming, about to wake up back on the other side of the galaxy, back in hell.

She sees Coulson, Hunter, and Skye, staring at her with wide-open eyes. Then she sees him. Sitting on the floor. Mack kneeling next to him, resting his hand on Fitz’s shoulder. Bobbi kneeling on his other side. They’re all looking at her, staring, shocked faces. And yet she’s afraid that they’re looking through her. That’s she is not actually there. That _they’re_ not actually there.

Slowly, Fitz uses the wall to pull himself up.

She can’t move. Too afraid that any movement, any breath could make it all disappear.

“Jemma,” he repeats quietly, tears in his eyes.

He starts walking towards her. Slowly. The other figures in the room become blurry, out of focus. All she sees is him. She looks at his face, then his feet. Watches every step he takes. Her hands reach behind her, and she feels the thick, cold glass against her palms. With every step, her heart starts to beat faster. He stops a few feet in front of her. His eyes seem to be staring into her soul, pleading with her to be allowed to step closer. She had missed his eyes for so long, had longed for his touch. She wants to grant him permission to take that final step, and yet she’s petrified to reach out her hands, petrified to touch him and only grab thin air. Her back is pressed against the glass crate. She looks into his eyes, tries to absorb some of the serenity, some of the strength that they’re emanating. She forces her body to react, forces her trembling hands to reach out for him. He takes one last step and grabs her hands. He pulls her closer, pulls her into reality, pulls her into safety, into his embrace. Her arms reach around his neck and his wrap around her body.

She hangs on to him and breathes in the familiar scent. She presses her body against his, tries to eliminate any space between them, tries to melt into him so that no force of the universe can separate them again. She feels his tears on her shoulder, tastes her own salty tears on her dry, cracked lips.

“Please, be you,” she sobs, “please be you.” She repeats it over and over as her hands run through his hair, across his shoulders, as her fingers touch his neck, his cheeks, as she feels his stubbles prickly against her fingertips, “Please be you.”

And he holds her. One hand reaches for the back of her head, stroking her hair gently, while his other arm is tightly wrapped around her waist, steadies her, brings her closer.

“It’s me,” he whispers, “It’s me, Jemma. I promise. I’m here. You’re here. You’re here.” She can feel how he tries to intensify his embrace even more, like he’s reassuring himself of her presence as much as he tries to reassure her. “You’re here,” he whispers once again, and she allows herself to trust his words, to relax in his arms.

* * *

_‘Cause no one knows but you_  
_How I feel inside_  
_No one knows  
_ _No one knows but you_


End file.
